![]() There was also a 2009 series, Desperate Romantics. My, the films are busy: IMDB has a (rumored) Keira Knightley film called Untouched in pre-production for 2013. Greg Wise is cast as John Ruskin Tom Sturridge as John Millais. Wikipedia notes that Emma Thompson is producing a film (with Dakota Fanning) called Effie. The dissolution of the Ruskin marriage is, of course, the background of the 1995 play The Countess. Wonderful to see. Thanks to the internet, you can even find some of the family photographs. The endpapers reproduce an original letter, with its crossed writing. In this book, Lutyens presents the letters with little editorial interruption. All these items bring Effie Gray back to life. Millais painted several portraits of Effie, all of which are well worth tracking down. Strangely, Lutyens seems closer to Effie in the earlier books handling Ruskin and his parents with lighter gloves in the last of the trio.Įffie is a forgotten woman of the past, overshadowed by her two husbands - John Ruskin (from whom she obtained an annulment) and John Everett Millais. These letters made me fall in love with Effie Gray, and I was quickly looking for the two additional books Lutyens edited on the subject: Millais and the Ruskins (1967), which advances the story and The Ruskins and the Grays (1972), which tells the backstory. An Adopt Films release.This was one of the first books I “sought out” having found it online - I drove to get it at a shop periodically visited in New Hampshire. MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic and sexual content, and some nudityĬast: Dakota Fanning, Emma Thompson, Greg Wise, David Suchet, James Fox, Julie WaltersĬredits: Directed by Richard Laxton, written by Emma Thompson. If you can’t get Elle, no Fanning is better than any Fanning at all. But after this, the latest in a long series of film-killing performances, perhaps even producers will get a clue. Her Effie’s sufferings have been lacking, and Effie’s romantic desperation is a non-starter.įanning’s name still gets movies financed, after a fashion. Effie is meant to be a hothouse flower, a “great beauty” who “blossoms” when a young protege (Tom Sturridge is painter Everett Millais) pays attention to her. ![]() The problem begins and ends with Fanning. Robbie Coltrane is a doctor, Derek Jacobi a lawyer. Thompson plays the forward-thinking arts patron Lady Eastlake (James Fox plays her husband), a woman who recognizes neglect and fears for Effie’s health and future. “You forget where you are,” his mother hisses. And she’s not allowed to protest her lonely lot. Ruskin has no time or interest, in ANY way, in Effie. When Effie moves in with her husband and his parents, she sees his passion is only for the work his exacting father (David Suchet) and smothering martinet mother (Julie Waters) have groomed him for. Turner,” for those who caught that biopic of the famed pre-impressionist English landscape artist.īut Ruskin was schooled for nothing less. He was the first to recognize the genius of “Mr. She “loves” him and accepts his proposal and moves from Scotland to London with the great man. Thompson wrote this vehicle, which co-stars her husband Greg Wise, and she’s not so great an actress that we can’t read “This dull child is absolutely ruining my wonderful period piece” in her performance.Įuphemia ‘Effie’ Gray was the obsession of her much-older suitor, the artist, critic and “greatest (art) teacher of our time,” John Ruskin. ![]() You can see it in the pained smiles of Emma Thompson, her co-star in “Effie Gray,” in which Fanning plays an ill-used child bride in the art world of Victorian Britain. Dead-eyed and expressionless, the once-wondrous child actress hasn’t matured into anyone worth building a movie around. Whatever “it” is, that spark that film actresses and actors have that makes them interesting and empathetic and anything else on the screen, Fanning doesn’t have it. So perhaps the cruel truth can be at last be said about Dakota Fanning without fear of being called a child-abuser.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |